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"Detroit is a blank canvas waiting for some more visionaries like Mies [van der Rohe]. People describe it as being dangerous, but they don’t describe Malibu as being dangerous, and it’s always on fire. That seems pretty dangerous to me. And Arizona is always on the brink of running out of water. That seems dangerous too."~Toby Barlow

Demographers and scientists alike broadly predict that once the history of the 21st century is written, water will have emerged as the primary commodity driving the socioeconomic forces shaping world politics and the well-being of the global population estimated even by mid-century to exceed nine billion. (Almost a 30% increase from now for those keeping track...)

Whatever energy alternatives the vicissitudes of oil pricing and availability drive along the way, concerns with accessible power sources will pale alongside the specter of thirst and hunger arising from a shortage of the world's most basic source of survival, H2O.

That's why Detroit's alarming population decline first reported last week in the Times signals what can only be a temporary passage in the patterns of global settlement beginning right here in America. The built world is going to need places like a city, named after the French word for strait, along a river dividing two of the greatest freshwater lakes on the face of the globe (by size, the fourth: Michigan, and the tenth: Erie).

With population exploding in inauspiciously stressed water zones across all continents including the deserts of the American southwest and Rocky Mountains' dry eastern slopes and their nearby badlands, the limits to growth from lack of it will soon come into sharp focus. If not due merely to literal shortages initially made apparent by periods of drought, raising costs will accelerate the awareness, especially as a handful of large international corporate conglomerates are quietly privatizing the world's aquifers and controlling their terrestrial consumption. Without natural supplies and rainfall, such corporate control will monetize ever more effectively the cost of quenching thirst and growing crops, not to mention meeting the needs of sanitation and industry.

Just 2.5 percent of the world's water is fresh, and according to environment correspondent Alec Kirby of the BBC, "two-thirds of that is trapped in icecaps and glaciers." (No reprieve therefore from global warming, as, whether one believes it's caused by man or not, the lion's share of the resulting melt-off turns salty from the first liquefied droplet.) He goes on, "The amount of fresh water available for human use is less than one percent of all the water on the planet."

Which brings us back to Detroit and the colossal supplies surrounding it. It's the Saudi Arabia of fresh water! (Add in the ease of navigation from its surrounding waterways, stretching as they do from the Atlantic to the Mississippi by lake and canal.)